The stories behind the buildings, statues and other points of interest that make Manhattan fascinating.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Pepper Pot Inn -- No. 146 West 4th Street

The elegant brick Federal style homes that lined Washington
Square by the mid-1830s spilled onto the side streets.One such house rose at No. 146 West 4th
Street, just half a block off the Square towards 6th Avenue.Three and a half stories high over a deep
English basement, it featured a refined, arched entrance with a delicate
fanlight.The red brick was accented
with white stone, similar to its high-toned neighbors on the park.In 1871 owner J. J. Lyons added a full fourth
floor and a gently sloped roof which his building permit deemed “a mansard
roof.”

By 1915 the streets once busy with the landaus and coupes of
the wealthy saw the first horseless carriages.The wealthiest residents had moved further north and Greenwich Village became New York’s Bohemia—drawing poets, artists and musicians to its quaint and
rambling streets.It was a time of enormous
change and the nation was fascinated with a new mode of entertainment:the motion picture.

New York was the epicenter of the silent movie industry and one
couple, Dr. Carlyle Sherlock and Viola, tried their hand at acting.In 1915 Carlyle played the part of Paul Greer
in “The Stain of Dishonor.”The 23-year
old Viola acted in a handful of productions.But before long they would abandon the silent screen for another
endeavor.

In 1918 Carlyle Sherlock purchased No. 146 West 4th
Street and renovated it as a restaurant nightclub, The Pepper Pot Inn. A later promotion would say it was “established
by Carlyle Sherlock for his wife, Viola, when they retired from the Motion Picture
Screen, as a meeting place for their friends of the motion picture, theatrical,
bridge and chess world.”(More than
acting, chess was a passion of “Doc” Sherlock.)

The former English basement, a few steps below street level,
became a restaurant where “Vi” served her homemade cakes, pies and
puddings.A postcard would boast “The
chickens and eggs come from ‘Air Castle Acres,’ Viola Sherlock’s 300 acre
Orange County estate.The special blend
of coffee is percolated and then filtered through Japanese rice paper; the Chili
Con Carne is done in real Mexican style; the Virginia Ham, and other Southern
Dishes specially prepared by our old Southern chef.”

The ceiling of the dining room, below street level, was strung with chili peppers and paper lanterns.

The parlor and second floors of the old house became dance
floors.And while the Sherlocks rented
rooms in the house directly across the street at No. 145 West Fourth, Carlyle
reserved the top floor for Viola’s private studio, “the largest in the village.”Flooded with sunlight from the expansive
studio windows, the space was decorated in true Edwardian style with wicker
furniture, Chinese lanterns and palms.

The top floor became Viola Sherlock's private refuge.

On the third floor was the Bridge Room.The space was rented for private banquets and
meetings and soon became home to Frank Marshall’s chess club.Marshall had held the title of United States
chess champion since 1909 and the club attracted professional and amateur chess
players nationwide.On September 24,
1920, for instance, The Evening World announced “The chess champion of the
United States, Frank J. Marshall, will begin tonight a series of exhibitions of
simultaneous play, playing a score or more of experts at once, at the Pepper
Pot, the Greenwich Village chess divan conducted by Dr. Sherlock…Mr. Marshall
and Dr. Sherlock will also play a match at ‘Kriegslpiel,’ a chess game in which
each player moves without knowing the moves of his opponent.”The exhibitions were given every Friday
evening and “will be witnessed and participated in by many of the strongest
players in the Greater City.”

The Pepper Pot was a sensation.Entertainers like Al Jolson stopped in and
neighborhood artists made it home.Waitresses, or “hostesses,” were often music or art students from nearby
New York University.But it was the
bohemian atmosphere as much as the good food that drew the crowds.“The uniqueness and originality, the
environment and bonhomie, all serve to make you remember the Pepper Pot when
you are away from it and you long to return,” said an ad.“It gets into your heart, too, and you will
never be able to lose the magic of it all the days of your life.”Theatre Magazine called it “the realest thing
in Bohemian atmosphere” in the country.

Young hostesses, often students, pose in the garden.

On the tables of the restaurant were candles—actually globs
of wax created by innumerable melted candles—inspired by The Pepper Pot Club in
London.The first candles were lit in a
glass tumbler.When the initial candle was
melted down, another was added, and then another.Before long a tall, volcano-looking mountain
of wax resulted, some up to four feet tall.Visiting artists would often sit before the wax at their table and carve
sculptures out of the waxen mound—temporary works of art that would soon be covered
in dripping wax.

A writer from Theatre Magazine in 1922 described her visit.“We found ‘The Pepper Pot’ jammed…that is the
main room, several steep steps down from the street level.And it had all the earmarks of your true
Bohemia…low ceilings…candle-light…a pleasingly irregular shape fitted with
nooks and corners and wooden seats along the walls.”The writer, Angelina, noted a large table in
the center of the room.“This table was
filled with young artists and newspaper men, we were told, and every few
minutes someone jumped up from it and went to the piano and played…popular
stuff, but with a nice feeling for the soft pedal and a full extraction of the
rhythm.”

Angelina then noticed Metropolitan Opera star Sophie Braslau
in one corner, and Chicago Opera tenor Signor Ciccolini at another table.Soprano Marguerita Sylva was there with her
aviator husband, Major Smith.The diva
said to Angelina “Isn’t this the most interesting place!”

Artists carved the accumulated wax of a succession of candles into artworks.

The 1920s would bring two major forces to New York and The
Pepper Pot:Prohibition and Jazz.

Like many of the nightclubs of Manhattan, The Pepper Pot
managed to continue business almost-as-usual despite Prohibition.Patrons still managed to have wine or drinks
with dinner—and only occasionally did the Sherlocks have to answer for it.

But there was that problem of jazz.

In the days before air conditioning open windows let in the
night breezes but also let out the blaring music.Inside The Pepper Pot flappers in fringed
dresses danced the Charleston and the Black Bottom with college boys.The Roaring Twenties had arrived and the
neighbors were not pleased.

On February 11, 1921 the two women from across the street--Mrs.
Hoolis B. Page of No. 143 West 4th Street and the Sherlocks's landlady, Mrs. Alberting de
Creveling of No. 145—filed a complaint with
Magistrate Corrigan in the Jefferson Market Court.

Mrs. De Cleveling complained “We can get no sleep.Something has got to be done with these coal
mines, these diamond mines, these gold mines and—that Pepper Pot at No. 144 W.
4th Street, directly opposite our homes."

When she insinuated that the restaurant sold liquor the
magistrate asked “Do you mean intoxicating?”

She replied “Why, our young girls and boys are picked up
unconscious from the stuff they receive at these places.”

After calling the patrons “slum seekers,” she turned her
attention to the noise.“That jazz music—oh,
my!Those funny ditties that they play
on the phonograph.I need sleep.”

Carlyle Sherlock arrived in court before the magistrate on
February 17.He was armed and ready.

“Mrs. Creveling says realty values have depreciated in
Greenwich Village because of the foreign element,” he said.“I rent my apartment from her.A year ago I paid $25 a month, and now my
rent has been jacket up to $125 a month.Realty may have depreciated, but rents in the Village have not.”

The Evening World reported “the proprietor had on hand a
number of witnesses and other evidence to show the place is so quiet chess
players make it a headquarters.”The
charge of “conducting a noisy place and public nuisance” was dismissed.

Jazz continued on West 4th Street, even finding
its way to the third floor chess club.On March 14, 1922 The Evening World reported that players “even get up
in the midst of a game, it is alleged, and change a gambit into a gambol, gaily
seizing their partners about the waist and tripping all around the place under
the inspiration of a jazz band.”The
newspaper described the Pepper Pot saying “It is extremely Greenwich Village—with
an automatic piano in the candle-lit basement and a group of furious jazzers
two floors above.”

In what had been a dignified parlor in the 1830s, flappers danced the Charleston in the 1920s.

A year later Viola, now 28 years old, would be arrested along
with two customers by Patrolman Joseph Reilly.Harry Maunbach was a 33-year old artist from
Chicago who was having dinner with a Brooklyn blue print maker, 25-year old
Walker Wacke.“The patrolman testified
in Essex Market Court yesterday that he found some liquor at a table occupied
by Maunbach and Wacke in the restaurant,” reported The New York Times on
January 15, 1923.The trio was held on
$500 bail each.

19-year old Adelaide Miller was in charge of the check room
on the evening of December 19, 1925 when 70 sophomores from the City College
were holding a smoker in the Bridge Room.What started out as a normal night turned into anything but that when
200 freshmen rushed in and started a riot.

“Four or five hundred additional guests were directly or
indirectly drawn into the turmoil, and pottery, silverware and chair legs, according
to the police, were used by the combatants,” said The New York Times.

In the melee, Adelaide was knocked down and received cuts
and bruises.Several of the gang broke
into Viola's upstairs studio, “breaking several rare Egyptian vases and leaving the
place in confusion,” the newspaper reported.Despite reserves of the Mercer Street police station being called in, no
arrests were made.

At the same time that Adelaide Miller was checking coats,
28-year old Gerold Schrage worked a few nights a week singing and playing
piano.The classically-trained pianist
came from Aberdeen, Washington and tried in vain to launch a concert tour.The Times noted that “Schrage’s tenor voice
was much admired in the Village, where he sang at numerous parties of
friends.It was said, however, that his
subjects—invariably classical—frequently were ‘over the heads’ of his
listeners, and that his efforts to entertain consequently often ‘fell-flat.’Jazz was not in his repertoire.

The young entertainer lived in a second floor room at No.
289 West 12th Street nearby.Things were going alright until his mother sent word that she was coming
for a visit in June 1926.Schrage
panicked, realizing that his mother would find out that he was not working as a
classical pianist, but as a nightclub entertainer.

“I cannot bear the thought of her learning that I am a cabaret
singer,” he told friends.

A week before his mother’s scheduled arrival, Schrage left
the Pepper Pot and returned to his room.He ripped his bed sheets, stuffing the fabric into the crevices of the
doors.Newspaper and strips of cloth were
pushed into the keyholes and cracks along the windows.He then turned on the gas jets.

By the time his landlady, Veronica Flanagan, smelled the
odor of gas and the door was broken down, the young man was dead.

Greenwich Village was still the center of art in the 1930s
and Washington Square became an impromptu outdoor gallery in 1932.But winter weather threatened to end the
struggling artists’ exhibitions.“Doc”
Sherlock came to their rescue by offering two floors of The Pepper Pot as an
indoor, year-round gallery.By December
9, fifty of what The Times called “needy artists” had taken advantage of the
offer.About 300 oil paintings, water
colors and etchings were hung here to be admired—and bought—by patrons.

Few traces of the Federal-style residence survive -- photo by Alice Lum

Exactly a year later, on December 5, 1933, Prohibition was
repealed.Finally New Year’s Eve could
be rung in with a toast.On January 1,
1934 The Times said “The lid was off last night in the city’s hundreds of
hotels, restaurants and night clubs.Not
since the beginning of the dry era fourteen years ago was there so great a New
Year’s crowd as that which turned out to greet 1934.”The newspaper reported on the cost of the
celebration in the Village.“At the
Pepper Pot, liquor-licensed, the charge was $10 a couple, with a bottle of wine
and dinner.”

By 1938 the Carlyles had retired to their country home and
Harry Schecter took over the Pepper Pot.The New York Times described the club “which boasts it is the Village’s
oldest night spot and certainly has been in business a lot of years.”The newspaper said it had “a certain feeling
as of the old speakeasy days, dim lights, intimate surroundings, a small dance
floor, no regular show but an m.c. (Boyd Heathen) who sings.Also, Works of Art on the walls, a
fortuneteller and, over in one corner, the patriarchal John Henry Titus, author
of one version of ‘The Face on the Bar Room Floor;’ if not Mr. Titus, then
another neighborhood celebrity, of whom there have been many in the proud
Pepper Pot past.It is that kind of
place, and it gets livelier as the evening goes on.”

The club now had “the famed Voodoo Room,
which is a sort of Greenwich Village version of Small’s Paradise in Harlem.”Here were singing waiters, a tap dancer named
Little Baby Bangs, “songstresses who dispense the torch, sophisticated and
rowdy-dow,” and the hostess, Dotty Keane, whom The Times thought “attractive
and courteous.”

The elegant Federal doorway that survived through the mid-20th century was replaced with something more mundane. -- photo by Alice Lum

The Pepper Pot, once the most popular eating place in the
Village and a nation-wide destination, would not last forever.In 1965 there was still a bar and restaurant
in the basement and first floor; but the upper floors had been renovated into
apartments.The 1830s Federal-style entrance
had been obliterated for a modern, nondescript doorway.

Where jazz music once played, an illicit after-hours club
called The New Showcase was run by the Mafia family of Carlo Gambino.It was shut down by Federal and NYPD officers
on July 18, 1971 in a predawn raid.

Today all traces of Viola and Carlyle’s jazz-age nightclub
are gone.The upper floors have been
renovated into luxury co-ops and the Pepper Pot’s dining room below sidewalk
level is now the Campus Laundry & Cleaners.One floor above, where young girls with bobbed hair and rolled-down hose
danced to the annoyance of neighbors, the Beauty Jewel Spa offers laser skin
care.

photo by Alice Lum

Many thanks to reader Eric Stott for suggesting this post. The above postcards were supplied through the generosity of Mr. Stott.

My family were great friends with The Sherlocks.I have home movies of them at their Warwick, New York estate, at our summer home at Lake Hopatcong, and in Coral Gables and Palm Beach in Florida. You can see that they were really fun people.